Feeds and data

In addition to the standard web pages we are also publishing some of the information behind Wildlife Finder as RSS and RDF and providing semantic mark-up in the form of microformats.

RSS feeds

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way of getting the latest content from a website - such as news headlines, articles or audio (podcasts) - as soon as it is published, without you having to visit the site repeatedly to check for updates. You can subscribe to any number of RSS 'feeds' and look at them all in one place.

Available feeds

Currently the following RSS feeds are available:

• Latest Wildlife - a list of new animals, plants, habitats and adaptations
• Wildlife Finder updates - a list of the latest updates to the site (new video clips, news stories, TV and radio programmes etc.)
• Collections - a list of all collections

Wherever you see this icon you can subscribe to an RSS feed.

How do I read RSS feeds?

For information on how to read a RSS feed have look at "News feeds from the BBC"

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Microformats

What are microformats?

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing Web standards. The approach allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and taxonomic information) to also be automatically processed by software.

Which microformats are you using?

Currently we are using the species microformat

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RDF - Resource Description format

What is RDF?

RDF is a standard model for data interchange on the Web.

RDF extends the linking structure of the Web to use URIs to name the relationship between things as well as the two ends of the link (this is usually referred to as a "triple"). Using this simple model, it allows structured and semi-structured data to be mixed, exposed, and shared across different applications.

RDF can be represented in a number of different serialisations (XML, N3, JSON etc.) - we are currently serialising the data as RDF/XML

For more information please refer to the W3C's website.

How do I get the RDF?

You've a couple of options. We content negotiate on our standard URLs - if you're client's request header specifies RDF then that's what you'll get. Alternatively is you add .rdf to the end of our URLs then we will return RDF rather than HTML.

How can I understand the data structure (what's the ontology)?

We have published a Wildlife Ontology to describe the structure of the data and define the relationships between the different resources.

You can get the latest version of the Wildlife Ontology here.